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Upendra Baxi

This article argues that Naz 2 holding against the indictment of the unconstitutionality of Section 377 is specious, to say the least. It points out that the reasoning is quite peculiar in many parts, and that while its institutional integrity might be at stake for the Supreme Court, for millions of the sexual minorities, it is nothing less than their fundamental human right to live with dignity that is at stake.

We, a group of academics, activists and artists in India, came together in June 2010 to campaign against yet another apartheid regime by extending support to the international campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. We believe that academic life is rooted in the values of...

A project that proposes to give every resident a “unique identity number” is a matter of great concern for those working on issues of food security, NREGA, migration, technology, decentralisation, constitutionalism, civil liberties and human rights. The process of setting up the Unique Identiﬁ...

Counting castes among the population is a more complex and contradictory affair than thus far imagined by its proponents and opponents. The opponents present it as an affair of expediency, not of justice; the proponents valorise it in terms of a realistic Utopia remoulding sovereign power towards an "ethical" state-formation.

Letters HIV/AIDS and Orphans I n a period of two decades, HIV/ AIDS has spread with a ferocious efficiency, accentuating its impact at all levels, leaving behind a track of huge social problems. Children, innocent victims, are the hardest hit by this rampant disease. Suffering the tragedy of loss...

Satyaranjan Sathe, who died recently, combined several roles in one. He was a beloved teacher, a widely respected legal educationist, constitutional expert, writer and social activist. But the Sathe legacy defies any simple summation. In all the many roles he took on, Sathe's sternest directives were always for himself; striving to uphold at all costs, the integrity of both public and private life. Above all else, it is this singular virtue that will remain his most enduring legacy.

The second act of the catastrophe in Gujarat was carried out within parliamentary portals, in the course of the debate on the Gujarat violence which exposed the hypocrisy that while political discourse might concern itself with people's anguish, it is in reality driven by aspects of competitive politics. Even as extraordinary violence was perpetrated on Indian women, it was women's bodies that provided the necessary domain for the assertion of competitive party politics - a fact reflected in the arguments and counter-arguments offered during the debate. As this essay suggests, the ominous final message that seeps through is that constitutional governance can achieve little except normalise violence, almost as a social cost of democratic politics, in which even structured practices of governance are established that deny as well silence women's sufferings. The task for the 'active citizen' thus is to frame imaginative patterns of social action that would not merely empower victims but also adequately present the voices of suffering, giving voice to the anguish - a task that could effectively challenge the newly instituted narratives of 'pride' and 'honour'.

One shudders to think of the colossal national waste which would have resulted in the absence of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library that gave Ravinder Kumar the eminent national space to shape both disciplinary and public dialogue on the future of Indian development. As its director, for well over a decade, Ravinder Kumar deployed that space to nourish forms of reflexive scholarship, in ways that many Indian campuses still unfortunately fail to do.

The review of the Constitution that has been instituted is a carefully planned political exercise. The oligarchic and patriarchal composition of the review commission is replete with authority figures and carefully excludes any imaginative voice from communities of social and human rights activism and independent scholars.

﻿In March 1995 the United States presented its first ever human rights report to the Human Rights Committee, the body charged with monitoring the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It is a tormented text marked by caveats and contradictions which the US congress annually refuses to condone in its invigilation of the human rights records of other sovereign states. The US has not only subjected its ratification to many explicit 'reservations ', but it has innovated treaty practice by lodging a considerable number of 'understandings' and 'declarations', thus attempting to hold itself above the internationally agreed upon code of human rights.